Archives for October, 2012

Hi everyone. This post is a “Good To Know”, but is mainly for those who installed the Beta version of iOS6 a while back.

Yesterday morning I had a Rude Awakening when both my iPad2 and iPhone 4s were deactivated. Now, I’m fairly new to the Apple Developers Program and this was the first time I had a Beta running on my devices. At first I thought it was something related to Apple’s new Terms and Agreement and that they were forcing everyone to re-activate their devices, so I play nice and click on the “Activate” button. Sadly, no matter how many times I try to Activate, I keep getting a message that the Server is unavailable.

Next up, I start mailing around (Because I can’t phone around thanks to been deactivated) to find out if others have this problem. Nope, it’s only me. I immediately knew that it had something to do with me running iOS6 Beta. What concerned me though was that I on numerous occasions checked for updates only for my iPhone and iPad2 to tell me I am up to date. So that’s already 2 misleading messages from Apple. Bleh.

The only good message I got was when I connected to my iTunes. iTunes tells me immediately that my software has expired. Great, so all I need to do is download the new iOS6 Installs and I’ll be sorted. The only problem is that both installs come to 1.8GB in size and I was working remotely on a 3G Internet Account. This meant that I had to spend the entire day without my iPhone and iPad2 which I rely on heavily.

Finally, last night I got home and began downloading the installs (via a 1Meg ADSL Line that should be pumping out 4Megs – Thanks again Telkom).

The end result is that I woke this morning, ran an update on both devices via iTunes Restore and BOOM! All is working again.

I think the bottom line is that had Apple provided intelligent Messages instead of just the general “Cannot connect to server at this time”, I would’ve known from yesterday morning what needed to be done. Furthermore, according to iTunes and my Devices I was already running iOS6 and not iOS6 Beta 3. Had they provided the correct info I would’ve reacted a while ago already. I expect a bit more from Apple.